The dynamic nature of provisioning desktops and predicting their overall load in a virtualized environment can be challenging to model and capacity plan. Anti-virus protection not designed for virtual environments can make this task significantly more complex. Although virtual desktops are capable of running traditional anti-virus protection on individual virtual machines, the accumulative performance impact on the infrastructure can be extensive, directly impacting operational returns and the number of supported virtual desktops. With the consolidation of corporate data within the data center, the need to be more vigilant and provide constant protection increases as activity at the endpoints reaches closer to critical data and servers than ever before.